Reviews
A Handful of Dust is the second Evelyn Waugh novel I've read. I picked it up at my library based on my enjoyment of The Loved One. The novel has three main parts and plays a light homage to Swann's Way with chapter titles like "Du Côte de Chez Beaver" and "Du Côte de Chez Tod." While the first part certainly reads like a parody of Proust with the bored young boy, the passion for ugly Gothic architecture and parties full of famous people this parody is merely a distraction. The second part is more akin to The Importance of Being Earnest and the final part is like a drunken rendition of Heart of Darkness. The novel starts off like any number of high society parodies that have come out of British literature. Tony Last and his wife Brenda are putting on a good show of being a happily married aristocratic couple until the untimely death of their son. Then things take a turn for the surreal. First there is the attempt at a comedy of errors with the husband pretending to have an affair so his wife can divorce him. He just can't bring himself to do it. So rather than go home and deal with the grief of losing a child he runs away to the jungle (Dutch Guyana). The jungle third has me thinking that I've been reading too many stories like this recently. First there was the very funny Fiction and then the not so funny "Sooner or Later or Never Never" by Gary Jennings and now A Handful of Dust. Of course in order of publishing, they go front to back but I've ended up reading them youngest to oldest. With one hit and one miss for me from Evelyn Waugh, I will try another novel from him. I will stick though to getting them from my library just in case I don't like it.
Funny idle-rich tragedy as usual. Read aloud, and I was at the limits of my sight-reading here; Waugh’s timing and compression are too grand to be scudded, really. Check this out for tight material symbolism: Beaver had a dark little sitting-room (on the ground floor, behind the dining room) and his own telephone… objects that had stood in his father’s dressing room; indestructible presents for his wedding and twenty-first birthday, ivory, brass-bound, covered in pigskin, crested and gold-mounted, expressive of Edwardian masculinity… (implies Beaver is subordinate to guests and his dead dad, who was married before 21, unlike him...). Is Brenda’s infidelity punished in a regressive Victorian way? Yes. But pater gets his too: the nasty colonialist final act is topped off with a crushing twist: Dickens unto death.
As far as I can tell, nothing anybody says in this book is remotely plausible, and nothing anybody does is even a little bit realistic, and I'm not even kind-of a member of the landed gentry living in upper class England between the two World Wars. And yet there is way too much that is painfully accurate and dreadfully familiar in this book's hysterical depiction of well-mannered sybarites proudly carrying on with their lives while the world politely disintegrates. Both the fits of uninhibited laughter I experienced throughout and the crushingly bleak comedown afterwards reminded me of a week-long ecstasy binge.
This book is such a gem! Waugh's writing is a beautiful, his style impeccable. Until I started reading Waugh’s works my favourite writer of English literature was Maugham but Waugh is now quietly ascending to the top of my list;) A Handful of Dust is both light and dramatic, ironic and chilling to the bone, a delightful comedy of manners and a tragic account, all at the same time. The book is beautifully crafted and Waugh manages to make the characters likeable despite their many flaws. He subtly reveals their motivations and what guides them to act the way they do. A wonderful read.
[3.5]
